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Brown Dog by Jim Harrison: review

Over the course of seven novellas in this collection readers can watch Harrison’s outlook and stylistic tendencies change over the course of one character.

Jim Harrison's Brown Dog, Grove Press, 522 pages, $29.50.

Jim Harrison

By Dimitri Nasrallah

Thu., Dec. 26, 2013

With nearly 40 books published since 1965, almost equally divided between the fiction that’s made him a bestselling author and the poetry he considers his true vocation, it’s safe to say that Jim Harrison stands as one of America’s most enduring contemporary writers. In the vein of Annie Proulx and Larry McMurtry, Harrison, who divides his time between Michigan and Arizona, has spent his career writing about the other America that doesn’t care what happens five miles outside its town limits, with an attitude more defiantly macho than progressive.

Harrison’s fictional world operates within supposedly outmoded dichotomies: men’s relations with women, nature’s foothold in the spiritual realm, the dance between morality and wildness within us. And though we recognize this as readers, there’s also something elementally sensual and raw in returning to these generations-old themes at a point in time when everything else in life feels alienated from them. Or at least there is when Harrison invests two decades working them out, as he did with his character Brown Dog. Now Grove has brought together Harrison’s seven Brown Dog novellas, written between 1990 and 2010, into one collection for the first time.

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First appearing in a novella of the same name that was part of The Woman Lit by Fireflies (1990), Brown Dog (or B.D.) is one of Harrison’s most beloved and iconic creations. An upper-peninsula Michigan native who may or may not have Chippewa Indian blood in him — his parents abandoned him at a very young age — B.D. is a lackadaisically amoral loafer who only does as much as he needs to keep a roof over his head so that he can spend the rest of his time fishing, hunting, and drinking. That roof doesn’t have to be much; a hunting shack will do. Meanwhile, the money he needs doesn’t have to be all that lawfully obtained either, as long as it’s quick, outdoors, and doesn’t take up too much time. When we first meet him, he’s scuba diving for long-lost Indian relics that he’ll sell to a shady Chicago dealer.

Ambivalent about his ancestral roots and yet all too ready to take advantage of the opportunities they provide him, Brown Dog’s lack of ambition is what simultaneously attracts and repels the women he sleeps with, many of whom are either trying to help him or use him. And yet despite his numerous dead-end imperfections, B.D. is as deeply magnetic a character to readers as he is to the women who enter his orbit. In Harrison’s hands, he leaps off the page with the same comedy and verve that Ignatius J. Reilly does in John Kennedy Tooles’ New Orleans classic, A Confederacy of Dunces — B.D. is an exceptionally funny character, and so we cut him more slack than he probably deserves. Though we’d rather not live his way, a part of every reader is drawn to his philosophy of living close to the land and lacking the very ambitions that alienate us from doing so. In that proposal, Harrison seems to say, the manner in which we direct our lives is rarely our own, but a social construct we accept as our own.

Harrison found enough inspiration in Brown Dog’s original incarnation to return to his story six more times over the next two decades. Along the way, the author at times abandons the high-wire first-person narrative that plays a large part in making B.D. so compelling, and the comedic spontaneity gives way to more considered symbolic tissue. In novellas scattered across various collections, the effect of such changes in approach wouldn’t have registered so conspicuously. But brought together as they are now, readers can watch Harrison’s outlook and stylistic tendencies change over the course of one character, which in the end becomes as intriguing as Brown Dog’s antics themselves.

Dimitri Nasrallah is an author and regular contributor to the Star’s book pages.

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